Birdie Hall

Sunday

Birdie Hall

My initiation into breastfeeding

The most fastidious of us prepare for the marathon of our first labor and birth, but still fail to wrap our minds around the unpredictable onslaught of intense sensations that breastfeeding brings. I knew that only a genuine catastrophe would prevent me from birthing my baby at home with a midwife, and I didn’t leave the prospect of using formula as a feasible outcome in any possible world. Despite this, I had no idea that my initiation into breastfeeding would amount to psychospiritual martyrdom. The distinctively American cultural complaint that nursing women (or “chest-feeders” as we are now called) must not discuss the importance of breastfeeding from fear of offending formula users need not apply here, but the benefits of breastfeeding are numerous.

breastfeeding

Monday

Birdie Hall

The case against surrogacy

Last July, Albert and Anthony Saniger filed a lawsuit against a high-end California fertility clinic after their dreams of having a second boy were destroyed when their surrogate gave birth to a baby daughter. After already choosing male names and Gmail accounts for their future son, the couple had explicitly made clear that no female embryos were to be transferred into the body of their surrogate, who had experienced two failed cycles of in vitro fertilization before a successful pregnancy in 2020. To add to the trauma of being forced to live with a healthy baby girl instead of a male, the Sanigers were now forced to spend “staggering” amounts of money raising the two boys they wanted and a girl, all bought via costly fertility clinic services.

surrogacy

Friday

Birdie Hall

I’m backing RFK Jr.

In the spring of 2021, I was barred from attending the remainder of my graduate school program at NYU for refusing to take the Covid shots, as hundreds of colleges across the country implemented novel vaccine mandates for students and faculty. I had spent the entire last year of lockdown Zoom school researching coronaviruses and mRNA biotechnology. By the time these drugs were rolled out at “warp speed” without long-term clinical data demonstrating their safety or efficacy, I could find zero compelling evidence that these experimental gene therapies would stop transmission and end Covid-19, the only morally compelling reason to mandate them.

RFK

Wednesday

Birdie Hall

Going native: is ancestral eating the answer to our dietary woes?

The question of what to eat has plagued Americans since the first conquistadors hit the shores and started rounding up and eliminating the only people who actually knew what was meant to grow and be eaten here. Historical accounts show the first colonists living in abject terror of the foreign foods of Native Americans, believing that if they began eating the strange corn, squash and beans around them then they would literally turn into Indians. As a result, many of them starved trying to grow their old-world crops in America. Now, hundreds of years later, the colonizers’ descendants are looking to the past in search of a solution to the countless health problems that plague consumers of American food. They’re calling it the ancestral diet.

ancestral

Monday

Birdie Hall

Married in Meteora

I first visited the Greek monastery of Agios Stefanos on the rocks of Meteora in the early spring of this year, one week after my baptism into the Orthodox Church. Greece was heavy with Great Lent fasts and preparations for Christ’s resurrection — Easter. I had just escaped the clutches of an extremely sweet but annoying young tour guide with whom my very Greek now-father-in-law had set my fiancé and me up for a tour of the ancient churches. I wanted nothing to do with this young man in a tour van who sounded like he was reciting words from a tape recorder. Later I found out he was, and had taught himself English by doing so (which is pretty endearing in hindsight).

meteora

Sunday

Birdie Hall

The radical alternative to a hospital birth

Giving birth hurts. A lot. Like any other major physical feat, it’s risky, but it’s not the inherently dangerous medical event some have come to believe. Plenty of women know this. Many are skeptical of the need to give birth in a hospital. But some are taking things further, deciding to forgo medical care entirely and give birth at home totally unassisted. Free birth, or unassisted birth as it’s called by most birth workers, is an intentionally unassisted birth: no professional, no midwife, no nurse, no doctor. For hardcore freebirthers, even having a doula present for your birth means you’re not doing it properly. Thanks to Instagram and one very compelling podcast called The Free Birth Society, the movement is growing.

birth

Wednesday

Birdie Hall

The myopia of the ‘Sunflowers’ protesters

As we stumble closer and closer towards nuclear war, environmental destruction and societal collapse, young people are feeling understandably a little hopeless. Some are shooting up schools; others are dumping hundreds of gallons of milk out onto grocery store floors to promote a “plant-based future.” Historically, when people are ideologically hopeless, they destroy art. The two disgruntled they/thems who recently threw two cans of Heinz tomato soup on Van Gogh’s "Sunflowers" thought that by defacing an oil painting depicting the sublime fruits of an unscorched earth they would draw attention to their cause: ending all oil consumption and thereby saving the planet. https://twitter.

sunflowers juststopoil protesters

Monday

Birdie Hall

How LSD helped me find God

The first time I took LSD was alone on Christmas Day in a snowed-in Montana cabin. I watched my skin crawl and the walls melt. It was the first time since childhood I didn’t hate my own body, and a nice break from the depressing bioethics I was studying in school. I took deep breaths and stretched. As the effects took hold, I watched illustrations fly out from a gorgeous, tattered copy of Mark Twain’s biography of Joan of Arc. Four hours later, after smoking an entire pack of cigarettes, I was convinced I was descending to hell. I watched fake flames lick the yellow wallpaper. It was miserable and listening to Nick Cave didn’t help. At dinner with friends later that night, the elk roast resembled human meat and the bread rolls made to commemorate St.

lsd